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The Corporeal Turn: Journal of Consciousness Studies January 2011
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and try to come out at the motor side. I very much agree with the late
von Holst when he suggests that we start at the other end and work our
way back toward sensation… It requires some different way of look-
ing’ (Teuber, 1966, pp. 440–1); E.V. Evarts states, ‘The implications
of these studies [of “brain mechanisms in motor control”] also extend
into the areas of psychology and psychiatry. Indeed, it seems possible
that understanding of the human nervous system, even its most com-
plex intellectual functions, may be enriched if the operation of the
brain is analyzed in terms of its motor output rather than in terms of its
sensory input’ (Evarts, 1974, p. 1398). In brief, if the brain is an organ
of and for animate movement, then animate movement and the tac-
tile-kinaesthetic or proprioceptive body that is its foundation should
be at the forefront rather than the hind end of scientific investigations,
and the inherent spatio-temporal-energic qualitative dynamics of
movement should be properly understood at the experiential level
where they originate, as when a fan worm, in response to a shadow
across its filtering crown, ‘ducks very quickly’ down its tubes, ‘only
emerging with great caution and very slowly, after a matter of several
minutes’ (Wells, 1968, p. 80), or as when an opossum, when overpow-
ered, ‘will go completely limp and apparently lifeless for several min-
utes, then suddenly bound to its feet and escape if it is no longer held’
(Scott, 1963, pp.70–1). ‘Responsivity’ is indeed a basic ‘sign of life’
(Curtis, 1975, pp. 27–8).1 When we give it proper attention, we
readily see that it is grounded through and through in the spatio-tem-
poral-energic qualitative dynamics of movement. Moreover if think-
ing is fundamentally a ‘motor act’ as Sperry suggests, and if tactility
like movement itself is a basic way of exploring the world and coming
to know it, as studies of non-human animals and human infants clearly
show, then the evolutionary basis of a gnostic tactility and kinaesthe-
sia should be transparent and its evolutionary importance should be
equally so. A paleoanthropological example will illustrate the point
and in the process will exemplify the import of non-linguistic corpo-
real concepts.
[1] Indeed, it might be noted with respect to U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was
shot in the brain in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011, that medical personnel were con-
cerned not with whether she had a continuing ability to read, write, or do arithmetic, or
even to speak. They were not concerned with linguistic or symbolic faculties but with
movement: with her squeezing another’s hand; with her opening her eyes; with her smil-
ing; with the tearing of her eyes and her taking the ring off another person’s finger. Con-
cerns were formulated in terms of questions such as: can she swallow?; can she stand on
her own?; can she move her right arm? In short, focal attention was on fundamental
aspects of animation, precisely those grounded in responsivity and indicating or eventuat-
ing in agency, a fundamental animate faculty rooted in movement through and through, as
the examples of the fan worm and the opossum clearly show.
148 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
contrary, in spite of the fact that it won’t stay still, it is precisely the
stable foundation on which to show that ‘mind is function of body’.
Proprioception and kinaesthesia are elementary facts of animate life
as shown by fine-grained studies of insects, arthropods, fish, birds,
mammals, and more (Laverack, 1976; Lissman, 1950; see Sheets-
Johnstone, 1998; 1999/2011, for a full account and discussion). It is
unfortunate that no one in present-day science pays attention to earlier
studies such as those of Laverack and Lissman, or even to later ones
such as that of Eckart Scheerer (1987) that focus on proprioception
and kinaesthesia, all the more so given riveted contemporary attention
on consciousness and the brain. Indeed, the astoundingly varied and
intricately detailed biological faculty that allows awareness of one’s
own body and body movement and that, in turn, in the most basic
sense allows knowing the world is a dimension of consciousness.
Inversely, consciousness is a dimension of living forms that move
themselves, that are animate, and that, in their animation, are in multi-
ple and complex ways engaged in the world. With respect to the brain,
that preened-over present-day human organ of choice, it is notable that
Darwin observed:
It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an
extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully
diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are generally
known, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a
small pin’s head. Under this latter point of view, the brain of an ant is
one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more
marvellous than the brain of man. (Darwin, 1981/1871, Vol. 1, p. 145)
The all-too-human practice of axiologically elevating what is at the
top precludes recognition not only of what is at the bottom, namely,
complexly varied and variable modes of locomotion, but of every-
thing in between, including the full and complex brain itself in the
form of the cerebellum and brain stem, not to mention the body as a
whole, the body in which everything is dynamically as well as mor-
phologically connected to everything else and that kinetically moves
as a whole. The brain stem is central to being awake and alert — obvi-
ously a basic requirement for cognition; the cerebellum has been and
is being recognized as something more than a lower-case brain entity
having to do only with movement, and thus a seemingly trivial if not
disposable item with respect to human sapience (see Schmahmann,
1997; 2000). Being awake and alert and moving are all in fact at the
heart not only of being alive but of staying alive. A further observation
by Darwin is notable in this context. In his chapter comparing ‘the
mental powers of man and the lower animals’, he wrote, ‘Animals
152 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
[2] Though it should be noted that Darwin certainly did not underrate ‘the power of Instinct’;
see Darwin (1981/1871, p. 46, note 15).
THE CORPOREAL TURN 153
life experience and basic in the sense that dynamics are the ground
floor of animate life. For such research scientists, the brain does not
function within a framework of reductionist thought. Reductive think-
ing decrees that humans are properly describable only in point-by-
point, localized ways. The living dynamic world of animate beings is
virtually off-limits in such research: that world is precisely unpredict-
able, uncertain. Who knows when a baby will wake or cry, or a crow
fly off to another perch? Who knows in exactly which direction a
whale will turn or when it will sound? Such knowledge would be akin
to knowing the exact patterns and shifting shapes in which clouds will
form and re-form. Unpredictability aside, an ordered and orderly
world in which there is ‘a place for everything and everything in its
place’ is a material world that leaves out meaning or makes meaning a
pure and simple neurological phenomenon, a world that not only pres-
ent-day cognitive scientists conjure in their experiential ascriptions,
but that philosopher Evan Thompson straightforwardly instantiates
when he states, ‘[t]he nervous system… creates meaning’ (Thompson,
2007, p. 13).
In sum, experiential ascriptions to the brain, together with the
reductionism it commonly upholds, compress life into a neurological
caricature of life. With not a full-bodied living animal in sight, neither
fine and painstaking observations and descriptions of the gnostic tac-
tile-kinaesthetic dynamic realities of animate life can be made nor, in
consequence, can the topic of evolution rise to its proper prominence
within human self-understandings, self-understandings that include
the relatively lengthy ontogeny of humans.
III
If we ask specifically what corporeal-kinetic knowledge we glean as
maturing infants, we readily see that, in the beginning, movement is
not a pre-given programme of proficiencies and capacities, but some-
thing we must actively learn — precisely by learning our bodies and
learning to move ourselves (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011; 2010).
Kinaesthesia — the experience of self-movement — is the ground on
which we do so. In reaching and kicking, we discover particular
kinetic possibilities of our bodies and correlative spatio-temporal-
energic dynamics in the process. In each instance, our movement has a
particular flow, the dynamics of which are kinaesthetically felt. When
we learn to turn over, we experience a spatio-temporal-energic dynam-
ics quite different from reaching and kicking, a kinaesthetically-felt
coordination dynamics (Kelso, 1995; see also Kelso and Engstrøm,
158 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
2006) that grounds our capacity ultimately to turn over any time we
wish. The phenomenological analysis of movement shows clearly
through its specification of the dynamics of movement, its spatio-tem-
poral-energic qualitative structure, that direction, range, intensity, and
duration are all inherent dimensions of movement, or in more precise
terms, that tensional, linear, areal, and projectional qualities are inher-
ent in movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 1966 [1979/1980]; 1999/2011).
It is hardly a wonder, then, that in reaching and grasping, for example,
an infant is kinaesthetically aware of how far away something is and
how big it is, how in pushing something away, it is kinaesthetically
aware of the effort or intensity of its movement, or how in stretching,
it is kinaesthetically aware of the sustained character of its movement.
Everyday movements such as reaching and grasping, pushing and
pulling, bending and stretching, and so on, are obviously dependent
on, and a measure of, human movement capabilities and dispositions,
but they are also, and are from the beginning, generative of concepts:
of near and far, up and down, weak and strong, straight and curved,
slow and fast, large and small, abrupt and attenuated. Experience —
actual, in-the-flesh kinaesthetic experience — is the spatio-temporal-
energic ground on which fundamental human concepts — non-linguis-
tic corporeal concepts — originate. As shown at length in earlier analy-
ses of thinking in movement and of the primacy of movement
(Sheets-Johnstone, 1990; 1981 [1999/2011]), in so far as concepts are
generated in movement, cognition is not separate from perception, per-
ception from movement, nor movement from an environing or sur-
rounding world. These inherently interrelated aspects of animation
constitute the complex and often subtle whole of any actual ‘real-
time’, ‘real-life’ self-movement as it unfolds (Sheets-Johnstone,
forthcoming 2012a). Synergies of meaningful movement, as noted ear-
lier in terms of their semantic congruency, are indeed consistently
informed by these inherently interrelated aspects of animation and by
non-linguistic spatio-temporal-energic concepts pertaining thereto.
Such synergies could not in fact develop from infancy onward in
default of the interrelated aspects or concepts, hence in default of a
consciousness of one’s own movement, which is to say in default of
kinaesthesia.
Clearly, what is of moment to living creatures from birth onward
are real life bodily happenings that resonate tactilely and kinaesth-
etically, which is to say experientially; what feels and what is moved to
move is not a brain but a living organism (Sheets-Johnstone, 2006a;
2008). Indeed, as pointed out elsewhere in a chapter titled ‘What Is It
Like To Be A Brain?’, ‘the brain is an organ, not an organism… it does
THE CORPOREAL TURN 159
IV
Recent critical reviews of experimental brain research such as those
cited above testify eloquently to the need to de-elevate the brain and
to begin seriously considering the ontogenetic heritage of adult
humans. That heritage is rooted in movement, that is, in the tactile-
kinaesthetic body and in the dynamic congruency of that body with
expressed emotions, and in the semantic congruency of that body with
expressed meanings. That body is precisely responsive — like all ani-
mate life is responsive — because it is attentive to something, curious
about something, apprehensive of something, motivated toward
catching something, explorative of something, fearful of something,
and so on — responsive because it is, in short, engaged in the world —
in the Umwelt in which it finds itself to begin with. Given the realities
of responsivity, it is clearly misguided to deny or doubt that animals
are conscious and conscious from the beginning of their lives: animate
beings have a proprioceptive and/or kinaesthetic consciousness of
themselves from the beginning. Contrary to being puppets in a motor-
ology drama, animate beings in their everyday lives create particular
movement dynamics and know straight away kinaesthetically and/or
proprioceptively that kinetic dynamic and its possible variations. Not
only a slip of the hammer but a slip of the tongue discloses an unfamil-
iar dynamic, a lapse in semantic congruency, a lapse in an everyday
synergy of meaningful movement. Indeed, human tongues are
waggable, not in the same way that dogs’ tails are waggable — human
tongues are waggable in far more complex ways, including being
mis-waggable and disingenuously waggable — but their dynamic and
semantic patternings, their synergies of meaningful movement, are
articulations on par with anthropologist Stuart Altmann’s concept of
‘comsigns’ (Altmann, 1967) in the animate world at large: synergies of
164 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
[3] It is worth noting that melodies are to begin with qualitative phenomena, qualitative in vir-
tue of their spatio-temporal-energic character. Varela’s description of his ‘exaltation’ at a
concert is testimony to the fundamentally qualitative character of melody and its qualita-
tively experienced dynamics (Varela and Depraz, 2005, pp. 67–8).
THE CORPOREAL TURN 165
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